Here we are on the five year anniversary of the great federal disaster called the levee failure of New Orleans and it is raining, still. We’re supposed to be commemorating the occasion with a Release ceremony on the bayou this evening – burning our grief and casting forth our wishes – but right now we’re wondering how in the world we’ll be able to stand on the grass without sinking into the muck. It’s fitting don’t you think, that today five years ago, I had been in the throes of not wanting to leave, citing Hurricane Betsy as a notch on my belt as to why I could remain in the city with a Category 5 storm heading our way.
The events that unfolded that day – taking the dogs for a walk early in the morning and realizing that most of the city had evacuated, the decision to leave and the items that seemed pertinent (computer, passports) and the 16-hour car ride that was the equivalent of the apocalypse as bumper to bumper we entered the contra flow – the surreal passage of hundreds of thousands of people, some who had never been outside the boundaries of Orleans Parish, most with cars that seemed ill prepared for the trip, in some cases 15 people to a car, animals in cages in the back from ducks to pigs, and all of us moving through some sort of dream-like state going from one unknown to another. We hit a squall in Alabama that gave us a taste of Katrina’s fierceness and it assured us we were all headed in the right direction – away.
Yesterday, during a momentary break in the rain, I went to walk my neighbor’s dogs because he is playing music in Shreveport this weekend and I ran into another musician neighbor who had her own anniversary on her mind, that of her and her late husband. She was telling me her patients have become more and more psychotic over the years, she’s a music therapist, and that she found herself right now in a state of denial, something she had learned well from these patients. I was trying to convince her to come to the Release ceremony.
I thought about the denial that had propelled me out of the city five years ago – in love with two and half men – my husband who couldn’t see the life I wanted, a lover and his boy who would soon be gone. When I think back on how I was able to internalize the pain of all of that and not go psychotic, it is a miracle. Five years later, I’ve learned to forgive first myself for not knowing how to ask for the life I wanted, forgive the husband for not seeing a life different from the one set in his mind’s eye, a lover who couldn’t see how he could wake up without his kids, and even a few years later, a birth mother who chose last minute to keep her daughter instead of put her up for adoption. I perhaps still can’t forgive the next birth mother who deliberately enticed us and then deceived us, but I do forgive the woman who gave birth to my wonderful son for all of the challenges she struggles to overcome.
The water has a cleansing effect and bears down on us to wash away our sins, but sometimes it feels like it will wash away everything – the good and the bad. In the game of Roshambo, water trumps. It’s fitting that I was speaking to another musician friend in Florida via email and said that we were in the throes evaluating five years after. He wrote back, “five years after what?” Ha.
